Amber Heard is ready to start a new chapter.
The Aquaman actress, 36, announced on Dec. 19 that she’s “made a very difficult decision” to settle the defamation case brought against her in Virginia by ex-husband Johnny Depp, 59. “It is important for me to say I never chose this,” Heard’s message, posted to Instagram, began. “I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed.”
On June 1, a Virginia jury ruled that Heard was liable of defaming Depp in her 2018 Washington Post op-ed—in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse” without naming Depp—awarding him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Though Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Penney Azcarate later reduced the punitive damages to $350,000, which is the state’s statutory cap or legal limit, which made his total damages $10.4 million.
In her Instagram statement, Heard—who filed to appeal the verdict earlier this month—said the “vilification” she has faced on social media is an “amplified version of the ways in which women are re-victimized” when they come forward.